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The GDON is irrationally fighting Flemming thread! ALL HERE!

First off, I love the movie and support the 'cause' so please don't think I'm trying to discredit what he has done, but I just have some questions/concerns.

I'm starting a club at my school which would be for Atheists & Freethinking people. We were going to cover mythology and I wanted to go over the mythological figures mentioned in The God Who Wasn't There.

So as I looked up each figure and found the according sites or information of them, through Wikipedia and other sources, I noticed that Beddru wasn't around.

I searched through Google and I found pages criticizing Flemming as a hypocrite for using this figure in his movie because it was the "real" God Who Wasn't There because it never existed and was made up in The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors.

I was wondering if anyone knew whether these were bogus sites - since there are still sites around saying that the world is flat you can't assume that they're all telling the truth - and it just happens to be that I haven't found any evidence in my sources or that Flemming made an understandable human error in including this Beddru.

Does anyone have anyother views on this?

"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into." -- Author unknown

I'd love to weigh in on this discussion myself, but I've long decided that gdon has nothing worthwhile to say.

I decided that long ago. I've never seen anyone say so little in so many words before.

I'm actually listening to you talk a lot right now Rook (fishdontwalk episode). I just literally LOLed when he said "Do you believe in God?" and you said "No I don't. I'm an atheist.......and I deny the holy spirit." I almost fell out of my chair. That was great man. He didn't even react.

I've been in contact with several historians, including Richard Carrier, over the past few weeks working on my Josephus essay, something I'm really looking forward to completing. I'd love to weigh in on this discussion myself, but I've long decided that gdon has nothing worthwhile to say.

This is the transcript (Note: slightly edited. Edits are indicated by "...&quot:

RRS Interviewer:
Brian, on the message board we had a question... we figured we'd sneak one question in from GDon who put together a list of questions that hopefully we'll have some historians answer in there. But the question was "Beddru of Japan seems to have been created by Kersey Graves in the 19th C. How did that name end up in The God Who Wasn't There movie? "

Brian Flemming:
You know, one thing that I regret, is that the word Beddru -- B-e-d-d-r-u -- I never mention anything about that figure in the movie but unfortunately it's in a background graphic where you can really see it and that's a mistake -- that shouldn't be in there. What I did was I cut and pasted from a list of gods that I was researching to find out "were these true or were they not" and I should not have put that one on the list.

Kersey Graves appears to have made that up. And so people who say, you know, that Kersey Graves is full of crap and this Beddru thing -- he only knows about it [so] its probably false -- they're actually right, and I'm going to change that in the second edition of the DVD.

I do have to clear up this whole, you know, I wish that I hadn't used a word that's associated with Kersey Graves anywhere in the movie, because there aren't any ideas associated with Kersey Graves anywhere in the movie. And Richard Carrier early on in my research actually steered me away and said "don't", you know, "he cheated, he's not anybody to rely on".

So unfortunately what they are doing in this movie that's over an hour long, they take one background graphic that appears for like one second and they blow it up to represent the whole movie.

RRS Interviewer:
Right. It's good that at least you admit that, cause there are people who wouldn't even -- they cling to their fundamentalist idea...

Brian Flemming:
Yeah, I think that I need to come out with a second edition of the DVD and correct mistakes as well as just remove stuff that people are clinging to that isn't terribly -- it's sort of tangential -- but basically rip -- The kind of good thing is that I can tell right now what all the arguments people are using against the movie are and I can create a second edition of the DVD that says absolutely the same thing in every way but doesn't include any of these sideline issues of these people, and I hope to do that actually soon enough that I can send that DVD to the people who are making the movie "The God Who Was There" -- do you know these fundamentalists are making an answer movie to "The God Who Wasn't There"...

I hope to get a corrected edition out there so that basically all the stuff that these people are doing to try to attack the movie becomes moot, because of the second edition with corrections and I've admitted mistakes that I've made. Which will probably stun them that you know someone can actually admit that they made made a mistake. They won't understand -- they come from a religious standpoint where they can never admit that anything is wrong at all that's in the Bible or anything they've said is ever wrong, whereas I'm rational, I can say "oh I made a mistake here and here and I'm going to correct them".

"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into." -- Author unknown

gdon tends to be another JP Holding follower/crusader that cannot be trusted:

"GakuseiDon, this critic engages in presumptive dismissal without elaboration, referencing apologetic source material out of context, poor analysis of historical context, and a myriad of other scholarly deficiencies that are unoriginally 'amateurish' and sophomoric consistent with the caliber of unskilled elaborations typical of latter day apologetics."

"The details of Jesus' story are so close to Mithras' myth, there had to be copying, right?

No. The answer is, "No." First of all, Mithras wasn't born of a virgin on December 25th, and His mother wasn't a virgin, and many other Jesus-and-Mithras-or-other-ancient-God-myth similarities are also phony. Made up. Not found in the ancient sources. If you've heard them, what you heard was outdated mythicist scholarship (late 1800s - early 1900s), or modern amateur enthusiasm, or internet urban legend."

Well, GD will need to take it up with the Catholic Encyclopedia:

* from the Catholic Encyclopedia - Natalis Invicti. The well-known solar feast, however, of Natalis Invicti, celebrated on 25 December, has a strong claim on the responsibility for our December date. For the history of the solar cult, its position in the Roman Empire, and syncretism with Mithraism ... The Mithraic congregations were like masonic lodges...

Mithras was born on Dec 25th or 3 days after the winter solstice. Richard Carrier even agrees with Kersey Graves & Acharya on this. Richard says:

"...consider his [Kersey Graves] emphasis on the December 25 birth date as a common feature. This is one of the things he [Kersey Graves] gets right, at least regarding Greco-Roman religion: all gods associated with the sun shared the sun's "birthday," erroneously identified as December 25"

It is fair to say that "much evidence of Mithra worship has been destroyed, including not only monuments, iconography and other artifacts, but also numerous books by ancient authors, such as Eubulus, who, according to Jerome in Against Jovianus, "wrote the history of Mithras in many volumes" As Robertson states:

There were in antiquity, we know from Porphyry, several elaborate treatises setting forth the religion of Mithra; and every one of these has been destroyed by the care of the Church.

These many volumes doubtlessly contained much interesting information that was damaging to Christianity, such as the important correspondences between the "lives" of Mithra and Jesus, as well as identical symbols such as the cross, and rites such as baptism and the eucharist. In fact, Mithraism was so similar to Christianity that it gave fits to the early Church fathers, as it does to this day to apologists, who attempt both to deny the similarities and yet to claim that these (non-existent) correspondences were plagiarized by Mithraism from Christianity. There are several problems with this argument, the first of which is that the god Mithra was revered for centuries prior to the Christian era."

"The similarities between Mithraism and Christianity included their chapels, the term "father" for priest, celibacy and, most notoriously, the December 25th birthdate. Apologists claiming that Mithraism copied Christianity nevertheless admit that the December 25th birthdate was taken from Mithraism. As Weigall says:

December 25th was really the date, not of the birth of Jesus, but of the sun-god Mithra. Horus, son of Isis, however, was in very early times identified with Ra, the Egyptian sun-god, and hence with Mithra"http://www.truthbeknown.com/mithra.htm

I just wanted to share some info so that others may have access to it. GD / 'GakuseiDon' has made many false comments here & in several other forums - don't let him get away with it.

Yes. What's so interesting about him is his claim that he's a truth seeker, merely interested in straightening out false accounts, but if at how he defends his own belief, you see that he has no problem at all holding to refuted claims.

For example, in the thread I posted earlier in the year, you'll see that he claims that 'adam and eve knew good from evil' despite this being denied outright in the genesis account (genesis 3:7 and 3:22):

Hope its okay to resurrect a dead thread... I just was reading this, and was currious about the status of the second edition of the movie. Anybody have any updates?

Since around August 1st Flemming has had it in his schedule to revise the movie around this point in September. We set Oct 1st as an important guideline/timeline as a last date to fix the movie before we print 1000 copies for the War on Christmas.

I'll call him soon to see if he made any headway. It wasn't a guarantee he would get to it in time for this printing.